Over the past five years, I’ve noticed that our work here at UCS on tropical deforestation has gradually changed its emphasis from actions in tropical forest countries, such as REDD+, to what can be done in consuming countries (which are not the same as developed countries) about the demand that drives tropical deforestation.

One might say that our focus has been moving up the supply chain, from where deforestation is happening to the consumption of the products produced on the deforested land. And we’re not the only ones to start looking at the loss of tropical forests in this more holistic way.

It’s easy to make announcements, but delivering on them is a lot harder. So a skeptical attitude — which is my standard operating procedure anyhow — is certainly warranted here. But there is one point on which the CGF already deserves credit: They’ve identified the fundamental causes of the problem.

“Whilst the causes of deforestation are complex it is generally acknowledged that the biggest drivers are the cultivation of soya and oil palm, logging for the production of paper and board and the rearing of cattle. All of these commodities are major ingredients in the supply chains of most consumer goods companies.”

For example, in Recipes for Success, on the vegetable oil industry, we showed how oilseeds, of which palm oil and soybeans are the leading kinds, have expanded rapidly into tropical forests. The land used for most kinds of crops, including grains, legumes, and sugar and root crops, has remained fairly stable, but for oilseeds it has doubled in the past four decades. Global consumption of palm oil, almost all of which comes from the rainforest regions of Southeast Asia, has skyrocketed in the twenty-first century. The result has been a tragic loss of tropical forests and their biodiversity and carbon stocks.

The consumption of palm oil, which is used in thousands of foods and consumer products, has boomed in the past decade. Source: FAOSTATS, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

In Indonesia, which has become the world’s leading producer, most of the increase in palm oil production has come from expanding the plantations, not from increases in yield. Source: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, 2010. URL: http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2010/10/Indonesia/

The companies that use these oils in their products have a key role, but so do consumers. A recent paper by Lian Pin Koh and Tien Ming Lee in Biological Conservationhas a valuable analysis of this potential. Under a scenario in which vegetable oil consumption in both rich and poor countries converges to a “healthy” level based on World Health Organization recommendations, the demand for land to produce palm oil would be reduced by 70 percent. (This would mean a reduction in per capita consumption in countries like the United States, by the equivalent of about one large serving of French fries a week; a small increase in China; and a substantial increase in India.)

This is a back-of-the-envelope estimate based on several assumptions, a few of of which I question, but that’s a subject for another blog post. What’s important is that Koh and Lee have shown that changing consumption patterns can make an important difference to the pressure for deforestation. In other words, our choices about what to eat really matter.

About the author:
Doug Boucher is an expert in preserving tropical forests to curtail global warming emissions. He has been participating in United Nations international climate negotiations since 2007 and his expertise has helped shape U.S. and U.N. policies. He holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan. See Doug's full bio.

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http://www.ucsusa.org/forests Doug Boucher

Richard and Paige,

Thanks very much for your comments. I appreciate Paige’s mentioning the case of Whole Foods, since it makes the point that just because a company has a green reputation, doesn’t mean that it has a policy to ensure zero deforestation throughout its supply chain. In fact, we found in speaking to businesses at the Natural Products Expo in Anaheim in March, that many of them had simply never considered the issue, nor had any idea of what ingredients they were using that caused deforestation.

However, these are the companies that are most likely to change their practices when consumers ask about them. They are very sensitive to what economists call “reputational risk”, and definitely want to avoid having their name linked to deforestation. So even a small number of consumers raising the issue with them, can lead to them taking it seriously — and acting.

Richard’s question is a good one, and as it happens there’s some recent scientific data on it. A review by Jack Putz and co-authors published in the journal Conservation Letters (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2012.00242.x/abstract) last month, showed that on the average, second-growth forests that have been logged retain about 75% of the carbon as unlogged primary forests. This is from tropical data, but I expect that the relationship would be similar in forests like those of Wisconsin.

That’s the amount of carbon that is actually in the secondary forest after logging. The rate at which it adds new carbon — its sequestration rate — will generally be higher in the secondary forest, but it’ll still take decades before it recovers the amount that primary forests do.

I hope that this has been helpful. Thanks for both your questions.

Doug

Richard Pulcher

I live in Wisconsin. Our first growth forests have been logged. The paper industry is an important source of income for the state. We still have woods. They come back on their own, and in doing so provide habitat for wildlife such as bear, wolves, bald eagles, and white-tailed deer. Does a second growth forest consume less CO2 than a first growth forest?

Paige Murphy-Young

Thanks for leading this charge on deforestation, for highlighting the extent of the problem with palm oil. Please add Whole Foods, Inc., to the list of companies that need to stop [ab]using palm oil. Egregious hypocracy when, in addition to selling products made with palm oil, Whole Foods uses palm oil in its own Whole Food label cookies.

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